Considering how often Hollywood
stumbles upon a great idea and lays the groundwork for turning that great idea into
a great movie, only to subsequently revisit that idea over and over with
terrible sanctioned sequels or straight-up rip-offs, it’s amazing there aren’t more
American-made James Bond imitations out there trekking the globe, neutralizing
espionage, and generally making the genre more mediocre. It seemed filmmakers
and financiers were a little less willing to borrow liberally from the
imagination of author Ian Fleming and long-time Bond producer Albert Broccoli, so
except for the Blaxploitation movement, which eagerly borrowed the character’s
archetype of working undercover, bedding women, saving the day, and being a
total bad-ass, resulting in some of the silliest movies of the sub-genre like
1977’s Black Samurai with Jim Kelly
or 1973’s gender-swapping Cleopatra
Jones with Tamara Dobson, you’d be hard-pressed to find many American
productions riffing dangerously close to the concept. (Get Smart doesn’t count.) As usual, to find a bevy of borrowed
concepts executed to shameless degrees, you’d have to go across the pond to
lands near and far – and when I say far, I mean far, far from Hollywood’s trademark owners and rights-holders – to get a
sweet, sweet taste of that Bondsploitation.
The Philippines had Weng Weng, a
little person with a max height of 2’9” who starred in his own series of
Bond-inspired spy spoofs, Agent 00
and its sequel For Your Height Only. (These are
real.) If you follow cult movies with any regularity, then it won’t surprise you
to know that India, too – alongside their own versions of Superman and even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
– had ripped off the Bond series, this one flagrantly rubbing their
unauthorized use of the brand in Hollywood’s faces with the aptly titled James Bond 777, described
as “the adventures of Kishore, a ‘James Bond 777’ CBI agent, as he and heroine
Sopa battle criminal mastermind ‘Boss’ and his gang which includes
whip-cracking Jamilla and a trio of highly trained dogs.” Australia got in the game with the action caper The Man From Hong Kong in 1975, co-produced by Chinese financiers,
and starring, ironically, Australia’s own native son George Lazenby, who
famously took over for Sean Connery in the earliest days of the Bond franchise after
the Scotsman demanded more money than producers were willing to pay. (Lazenby
is the subject of a tremendous and unexpectedly hilarious documentary on Hulu
called Becoming Bond – I can’t
recommend it enough.) But leave it to Italy, king of the counterfeiters, in
addition to their own versions of JAWS
(Great White aka The Last Shark), Escape
From New York (The Bronx Warriors),
and Mad Max (The New Barbarians) to make not just their own Bond rip-off, but to
actually have the audacity to cast – wait for it – Neil Connery, younger brother of Sean Connery and very much a real
human being you didn’t know existed until just now. Known, hilariously, as O.K. Connery, Operation
Kid Brother, and Operation Double 007,
it even includes a handful of actors who had appeared in earlier James Bond
films like DR. No’s Anthony Dawson
and Bernard Lee to establish that the Italians were really going for it. (Interestingly, Connery’s character isn’t
called James Bond or a remotely similar pseudonym, but rather “Dr. Neil Connery.”) Years later, in
1984, Kid Connery also appeared in China’s unrelated Mad Mission 3: Our Man From Bond Street for celebrated cult director Hark Tsui (Van Damme’s Knock Off and Double Team), in which “a master thief is duped by lookalikes for
James Bond and the Queen of England into stealing a valuable gem from a heavily
guarded location, then must help the police recover it.” Six of these movies were made between 1982 and 1997, released in
China and America under the monikers Aces
Go Places and Mad Mission,
respectively, and while they were all spoofs of the Bond franchise, only one of
them featured a Connery. Guess which brother.
Meanwhile, somewhere over in
Turkey, a Frenchman named Jean-Marie Pallardy, director of softcore films like Erotic Diary and Hot Acts Of Love, was prepping his own take on the Bond concept,
only this time with a twist. Buoyed by a pretension and grandiose
self-importance of which only European filmmakers are capable, White Fire (aka Vivre Pour Survivre) takes the concept of an undercover superspy
(Robert Ginty, The Exterminator series)
and gives him…a sister (Belinda Mayne, from another Italian rip-off, Alien 2: On Earth), who gets involved
with her brother’s missions. Our characters’ fates are written in the film’s
very strange prologue, which feels like something James Glickenhaus would’ve
directed while being Italian, as our young brother and sister witness the
assassination of their parents by anonymous soldiers (one of which includes a
pretty gnarly death by flamethrower, allowing for a fiery cameo from the
director himself). Young Bo and his sister Ingrid (sometimes accidentally
called “Inga” by people who should know better) grow up under the care of Sam
(Jess Hahn, The Trial), “the
American” who saved them as children on the beach. With his guidance, they
become Turkey’s go-to brother-and-sister superspy team straight outta MI-6.
Just kidding! They become JEWEL
THIEVES.
I know, I know, hang on – we’re
getting there.
The siblings – the both of them, mind you, at least I think – inexplicably work at a diamond
mine in the middle of a desert in Istanbul (which is misspelled on the opening title
card). Apparently, I think, Bo and
Ingrid have been stealing diamonds from their company for years and selling
them to your usual collection of bad guys, only a higher-up at their company, Yilmaz
(Gordon Mitchell), is both aware of this and
in on it for reasons never explained.
Soon we meet the bad guys, headed
by Sophia (Mirella Banti, Tenebrae),
sometimes called “Sophie” by people who should know better, a fierce Italian
crime lord. Or is it Barbossa (Benito Stefanelli), sometimes accidentally
called Barbarossa by people who should know better, who is actually the one in
charge? Or is it Paydin (???), a man who definitely exists in the movie but who
doesn’t appear on IMDB or anywhere on the Internet? Yilmaz, it seems, is in
cahoots with this shady trio, and has a deal to sell them the diamonds that Bo
and Ingrid have been pilfering from the diamond mine. Say, why bother with all
these extra steps? Why wouldn’t Yilmaz just steal the diamonds himself and cut
out the middlemen? What in the good gravy of Turkey is going on in this movie?
White Fire throws an awful lot at you during the first five minutes
of its present day, and frankly, if you’re not already lost at that point, I’m
impressed. Is this entire diamond
operation good or bad? Hell, are Bo and
Ingrid good guys or bad guys? Is this one of those crime/caper flicks born
from the era where you rooted for the thief, like Charley Varrick or The
Getaway, or does director Pallardy fail to understand characterization? No
justification is ever offered for why Bo and Inrid have chosen this line of
work, but White Fire definitely wants us to sympathize with
them regardless of how they ended up there.
Now, about that incest…
At some point during the movie’s
making, Pallardy made the baffling choice to portray his two heroic siblings as
being closer than normality allows. Adult
Bo seems…a little too preoccupied with his sister. Mainly, her beauty. Mainly,
her naked beauty after she climbs out of the pool following a skinny dip
session, at which point he rips away her towel to get a glimpse of her fine
flesh. “You’re not anybody’s kid sister anymore,” he says, his eyes trained on
her naked form. “You know, it’s a pity you’re my sister,” he adds.
And boy, it’s weird.
Really, that’s just the beginning
– merely a single instance that, if you wanted to, could be dismissed as one of
those unfortunate translation hiccups that happens every so often in
European/American co-productions (similar to how Liam Neeson’s Brian Mills
seems overly possessive of his daughter in the first Taken, with his dialogue at times more appropriate for an eager
young lover than his own progeny). On paper, there’s nothing “wrong” with this.
American culture has always been more buttoned up than our European
counterparts, right down to how we interact with our own families. They kiss
their relations on the mouth; we don’t. Third generations see their
grandparents with regularity and even live with them in greater numbers; we
don’t. And, I guess, they leer at their naked sister and opine about how the
only thing keeping their libido in check is their DNA; we…definitely don’t.
(Insert typical redneck joke here.) Just the fact that most European statues
and artwork portray naked subjects and ours have on thirty layers of stuffy
clothing tells you everything you need to know about the difference in our cultures.
Because of how truly insane White Fire ends up getting, I don’t
know if it’s a spoiler to tell you that Ingrid is attacked and killed by the
flick’s requisite bad guy (well, gal) during the first act, and after Boris’s
entire life ends emotionally, Sam does the only responsible thing he knows to
do: he chooses a prostitute who looks like Ingrid (Diana Goodman), gets her
plastic surgery, and trains her to mimic Bo’s departed sister, eventually – basically
– replacing the departed Ingrid with this new model named Olga. Why Sam assumed
that Bo’s fragile, compromised mind would be able to handle such a casually
cold doppelganger switcheroo is part of what makes White Fire so goddamn fascinating. This isn’t Sam acting as the
covert snake in the grass for some shadowy crime group; he’s not some mind-fuck
genius like Hannibal Lecter putting the mental whammo on an already delicate
target. This was just Sam being Sam because he honestly thought this was an
okay and helpful idea; i.e., “Ah, jeeze, Bo’s sister died. I better get him a new
one.” In fact, the closest to real, actual human that Sam gets with respect to
his plan is that Ingrid had already been immersed in the shady goings-on of
these bad guys (you know, the ones who KILLED HER), and they could use Olga,
her replacement, by re-inserting her right back into the scheme and none of
their progress would be wasted. Sam really
wants to get rich! And I’m not postulating here, because he caps off the
breakdown of his weirdo plan to Bo by saying, “We’d be rich!” Oh sure, Sam
wants Bo to get over his pain, but he also wants them out of the smuggling game
for good, and the fabled white diamond could be their ticket to retirement. It
all hinges on Sam’s well assembled scheme (and I’ll paraphrase to make a point):
Bo: “The bad guys definitely shot
a nail into Ingrid’s brain and she’s dead.”
Sam: “Let’s go for it anyway.”
So, are Sam and Bo calling the
bad guys’ bluff, or do they think some other
unrelated group of bad guys are the ones responsible for Ingrid’s death so it wouldn’t
be weird when she came back from the dead? And, to sound as callous as Sam for
a moment, why the hell do they need Ingrid or Olga at all? Are they incapable
of working directly with the bad guys to offload their cache of stolen
diamonds? White Fire, in its ongoing
theme, never makes that clear.
At first, Bo is understandably
dismissive of this plan – and not because Sam, his longtime father figure,
could be so uncaring, but because his plan relies on a lazy sleight of hand no
one would ever possibly believe: the bad guys would see the newly transformed
Olga, believe her to be Ingrid, and think, “Huh…I guess she survived getting
her brain shot with a nail…and also forgot
about that time we shot her brain with a nail.” Piss off with that emotional
turmoil: logistics – this is where Bo’s main focus lies. And he’s not wrong.
Things only get worse once the scheme
is underway and Bo starts treating his replacement sister pretty poorly – again,
not because he’s still mourning over Ingrid’s death and how dare this impostor
think she could replace her, but more because Olga initially fails to know the
things that Ingrid knew and do things in the same way that Ingrid used to do
them. She is a poor student behind on her studies and he is the teacher who’s
had it. During one pivotal moment, Olga loses her cool while trying to be
Ingrid and rattles off a sarcastic remark about how she’ll never be as perfect
as Bo’s “saintly sister,” leading Bo to slap her very hard in anger. (This is
your reminder from me, your host, that we’re still supposed to be rooting for Bo in spite of this – that, at
this moment, White Fire, almost
offensively, wants us to throw our full emotional support behind the girl-slapping,
sister-replacing, sex-pervert diamond thief.) It’s that moment in every romantic
dramedy where the main couple, with their own traditions and rituals, break up
in a highly dramatic manner, and then later, after one or both of them have met
someone new, they see in real time how their replacement lovers fail at being
the same person they’re trying to replace. That’s exactly what Bo experiences
during the second act of White Fire,
only this time, the former lover he’s trying to replace is his sister, and yep, we’re still in increasingly
weirder and weirder territory, but things, somehow, get weirder still – and
much, much cringier.
When Olga returns from her
successful plastic surgery (which also sees the return of Belinda Mayne), Bo
falls in love with her immediately. “I love you, Ingrid,” he says, holding her tightly…and Olga is totally fine with this – totally fine with throwing away her entire identity and serving as
understudy to a dead girl she’s never met with whom her own brother seems to be
in love. Moments later, Bo and Olga are on a boat where she is straddling him.
He slowly undoes the straps on the front of her dress and caresses her bare breasts…as
flashback scenes of an underage Ingrid play in his mind. (Sam’s just a few feet
away in the hull during all this, by the way.) Whether Bo is being intentionally
portrayed as someone finally able to embrace the realization that he’s in love
with his dead sister, or through necessary movie machinations lacking those
deeper implications that exist simply to drive the narrative forward, White Fire never specifically
clarifies. (In real life, director Pallardy has been angrily dismissive of the
incest theory, trying to pass off this conspiracy as puritanical Americanism,
even pointing the finger at those who believe such a thing and insinuating
maybe they’re the ones with sexual
hang-ups. Granted, it’s ingrained in our culture to be weary of open sexuality,
even though we use it to sell everything
– from gigantic hoagies to kids’ clothes
– but I’d like to think we’re on
the ball enough to know what incest
looks like.)
Weirder still, this new love isn’t presented as a conflict. This
isn’t some kind of psychological malady on which Sam looks back and which
forces him to realize he’s made a terrible decision in setting this whole thing
in motion. This isn’t a moment where parables about accepting death come into
play and shape the rest of the movie, leading Bo to realize there is no replacing a lost love, plutonic or
otherwise. If White Fire is successful,
then the audience will want this to
happen because Bo deserves to be happy, and the romance that blossoms between him
and Olga is meant to mirror that kind of surface-level, happy-ending love as depicted
in most superficial romances. White Fire
doesn’t want its audience to feel conflicted, and it doesn’t want them to
think, “Oh, Bo, no! Don’t go down this road!” White Fire wants its audience, instead, to sigh wistfully and say,
“Ah…good for them. They deserve love.”
If you think this is White Fire’s sole example of total
insanity and reckless incompetence, you’re horribly wrong. All of White Fire is
made with this kind of delusion where the siblings’ love isn’t nuts, or the good guys’ Ingrid/Olga-swapping plan isn’t absurd, or the bad guys’ schemes
and double-crosses are totally clear,
or the lead evil femme isn’t
hilariously dubbed and very poorly portrayed, or the sought-after white diamond
isn’t a totally useless subplot
(considering it explodes at the end for absolutely no reason). Fred Williamson’s
Noah eventually shows up as a kind of third-party complication looking for Olga,
and he spends so much time in his own subplot that you become convinced White Fire is one of those situations
where two unfinished films were edited together as one fully incomprehensible
mish-mash. But nope! It was all part of the plan, I guess!
Right around now, you’re probably
wondering, “this doesn’t sound like a James Bond rip-off at all.”
Well, strap it on, Moneypenny.
The framework for your typical Bond picture is all right there in front of you.
Right off the bat, Bo is Bond, and Ingrid/Olga are any number of Bond girls
that have perished over the years, leaving Bond to wonder if the superspy world
is for him. (In fact, the women in White
Fire echo those from the Bond series: really only there to make shit much
more complicated for the men, either through emotional sabotage or
cloak-and-dagger duplicity, and they are almost entirely disposable.) Sam is
“M,” Bond’s handler, mentor, and all-around paternal figure – the one who finds
the missions, arranges the plays, sets Bo out into the criminal underworld while
he stays behind and reaps the benefits. The diamond mine where the siblings
work, only ever called “the organization,” looks less like an industrial mine
and more like a post-apocalyptic bad-guy headquarters straight out of John
Carpenter’s version of 1997’s New York, containing numerous shady rooms where
people are tortured and executed, and where its armed guards have hilariously
oversized helmets worn by the likes of Rick Moranis in Spaceballs. You’ve got the international bad guys, the espionage, the
double-crosses, the triple-crosses, the
sporadic fight scenes, the quippy one-liners. You’ve got the third-party
frenemy in Noah, who seems like a bad guy, and possibly is a bad guy, but maybe ends up being a good guy because he helps
the “siblings” out of a jam. You’ve got “the mission,” which is stealing the
white fire diamond – a diamond so dangerous that it scorches the flesh of
anyone who touches it – and you’ve also got what the movie is really about, which is who the hell
knows? You guys, there’s a part where a hapless schmuck is tied down to an
industrial table saw that inches closer and closer to his balls akin to the
infamous laser beam scene from Goldfinger,
only this time the poor slob doesn’t make it off the table. And if THAT wasn’t
enough, you’ve got the goddamn TITULAR MOVIE’S THEME SONG.
White Fire is a mystery, and for so many reasons, chief among them:
where did this movie come from? How is it possible that so many movies, either
from the golden era of bad cinema (the ‘80s) like Chopping Mall or Pieces,
or from the modern age like Tommy Wiseau’s The
Room or James Nguyen’s Birdemic or
anything Neil Breen has ever directed, can be celebrated for their turdiness,
but meanwhile, something so deliciously stupid as White Fire has gone unwhispered about on street corners like the
anti-Candyman? But okay, fine – sometimes movies get lost for a long time and then
come roaring back, so we can put that aside and focus on the question that
truly matters: WHAT is going ON in this MOVIE? Can anyone tell me? Because I’ve
spent three thousand words trying to lay it all out in order and it still doesn’t make a lick of sense.
White Fire exists in its own world and
lives by its own rules, where characters repeat lines of dialogue that
should’ve been removed in the editing room, offering the impression that every
character has obsessive compulsive disorder. White Fire is the kind of movie where Fred Williamson carries an
unlit cigar at all times, even in scenes when he’s shielding himself from
gunfire and moments from death (and you just know this was Williamson’s idea:
sacrifice a tiny bit more realism in exchange for looking “cool”). White Fire is the kind of movie that
depicts a normally icky place like a plastic surgery clinic as a haven for
girls to wander around half-naked wearing colored togas like goddesses on Mount
Olympus. And oh yeah, White Fire is the kind of movie where
the girl-slapping good guy wants to bang his sister but then she gets a nail
shot into her brain and dies so he finds a replacement and she gets plastic
surgery to look like his dead sister and then he bangs her instead.
Honestly, cataloging and
transcribing all of White Fire’s irrationality
is an impossible task and I’m doing you a disservice by trying; instead, you
need to experience it for yourself, because along with all the crazy, it’s
entertaining as hell. It hits the ground running with rampant stupidity and never
lets up. From literal chainsaw fights to haphazard car chases to unflinching giallo-like violence, White Fire is non-stop, and if the plot
starts to feel like it’s not coalescing in your Bond-proofed brain, don’t give
a fuck because it wouldn’t make sense no matter who was looking. If you like
cheesy ‘80s action flicks, European curiosities, so-bad-it’s-good trash
classics, overly dramatic Italian-style quick-zooms, or another title to watch
during your Robert Ginty fan club meetings, White Fire is here to make you say, “Oh, brother – I love you.”
Luckily for you, it’s now
available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.
